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A Look at Houston’s Real Estate Market Post Harvey

In the past 25 years, home prices in Houston more than doubled, increasing by 155 percent, according to a study by financial technology company Smartasset. At the same time, Smartasset's analysis of historical home price data says buying in Houston's housing market is a sound investment.

As hurricane season rolls around, many have wondered how the market has held up since the devastating storms of Harvey. According to a recent article by Houston Business Journal, Houston’s housing market still strong in August, even after removing the 'Harvey effect'

The median price of homes sold in Tomball has been increasing year over year. [Community Impact]

As seen in Houston Business Journal

The storm’s timing toward the end of the month — when home closings are commonly scheduled — caused August 2017 single-family home sales to plummet 25.7 percent compared to August 2016, the Houston Association of Realtors reported at the time. Thus, year-over-year comparisons for August 2018 are distorted, but the market is still going strong even after removing the “Harvey effect,” according to a Sept. 12 press release from HAR.

A total of 8,358 single-family homes were sold last month — a 37.2 percent increase from a year earlier and up 4.3 percent from August 2016. Single-family homes sales were also up 7.6 percent year over year when looking just at the Aug. 1-24, 2017, period — before Harvey hit — compared to the same period last month.

Sales of all property types in August 2018 totaled 9,978 for a total dollar volume of $2.86 billion, up 36.8 percent and 40.1 percent, respectively, when not excluding the Harvey effect. However, those totals are right in line with other months this summer — falling just between the figures HAR reported in June and July of this year. Sales of all property types were up 1.7 percent in June and 8.5 percent in July compared to the same months in 2017, while total dollar volume was up 6.6 percent in June and 11.4 percent in July.

Meanwhile, both the average and the median prices for a single-family home reached their highest levels ever for an August in Houston. The average price was up 1.9 percent to $300,670, while the median increased 3 percent to $236,870.

“We all know how catastrophic Harvey was and how incredibly resilient our community has been, so HAR has taken great care to gauge Houston’s August housing market performance as accurately as possible given the data distortions caused by the disaster,” HAR Chair Kenya Burrell-VanWormer with JPMorgan Chase said in the release. “We will likely see similar distortions in the September numbers, as Harvey’s effects lingered; however current market conditions are healthy, with single-family home sales and rentals up despite constrained inventory.”